. . . for those of you like me who hate to have to log into your homepage and you just like to have an Amazon-like experience where you come back and say, hey, we think we know who you are, so it just works, I've been dying for that feature, we're going to get that feature up and running; and then a lot of great personalization, implicit personalization not explicit personalization like we've done where today among even the best, us, Yahoo, My Yahoo, My MSN, everyone else, the most you can get is somewhere between 10 to 15 percent of personalization because of that explicit thing that's required. We're going to work on getting so where as you click and surf that we learn about you, we'll just build custom pages. We have a test of this up and running on kind of our sandbox, our Google labs equivalent, if you will, where you can go up on a news service and as you click we learn about you and customize a news service for you.

Someone is going to write a great book about the twists and turns of the search business. The background story to how this is all getting covered is far richer than anyone can go into at this point.

For those following the growth of my family - no news yet. But soon. We hit full term yesterday so we are ready at any time. We are having a great time as a family of three getting ready for the new arrival.

May 19, 2004

It has been fun watching the varied reactions to Google's moves in the market lately. It is a fascinating clash of idealism and skepticism, techno creativity and steady state views of the world. As I read the S1 I found myself thrilled by the overall daring represented in the document. The only element I disliked was the limited resources given to the non-profit foundation and the cap on free time investigations of the employees.

The marketplace seems dumbfounded by a company innovating and executing at this pace and scale - but much of that reaction says more about the failings of market incumbents rather than the radical genius on display at the googleplex. What entitlement did the Wall Street folks think they have exactly to cream money from IPOs? Aren't these folks proponents of the very free market approaches exemplified in the dutch auction? What entitlement did the advertising companies think they had to turn the internet into a sea of popups and brand advertising that didn't have real value for advertisers and made the web less useful at the same time? Isn't pay-per-click and usefully targeted ads the sort of innovation internet advertisers should have created? And the webmail companies? Did they think they had an open ended lease on their users with rights to cripple the usefulness of the tools and drive up the advertising taxes they imposed? And desktop search? I can't imagine Google doing something better than what OS X does for me - but if they can I can't wait to see it. And for those using other operating systems where you can't find anything and the default result on your Outlook query is "no results" - well soon you'll have options.

I do think these innovations contrast with the most "me too" of some Google projects. I'm thinking here of things like Froogle or Google Print - where there aren't real benefits for users over the alternatives. On this front, it seems like it is Google who is taking advantage of their market power without adding real value to users. It's not hard to imagine ways Froogle ot Google Print could become unique and uniquely useful - and that makes their current state all the more "less Google-like".

May 18, 2004

On Thursday I turned 33 years old, went on leave from my employer, and shifted attention to pending product launches of a different sort. All start ups I've ever worked on involve intense sleep deprivation, so I'm resting up now for what's coming up. More to follow.